JACKSON, KY — The home where Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) spent his summers with his grandparents still stands just outside a tiny town in Breathitt County, Kentucky. Vance has credited this place with shaping who he is, a testament to his deep connection to Appalachia, located just under 200 miles from Middletown, Ohio. Despite the instability caused by his mother’s struggles with addiction and failed marriages, this place remains a source of inspiration for Vance. 

The area is beautiful in that haunting Appalachian way: The mountains arc softly, and the hollers in between them, such as the Panbowl Branch, where the family homestead sits, hold homes often in decay. It’s a place where people who hold on to hope to make something of themselves and others try to power through the best they can.

Breathitt County is one of 423 counties in the region the government defines as Appalachia, which stretches across parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and the whole of West Virginia.

When you are from here, one of two things happens: You cannot wait to find a way to stay and carve out a life for yourself, or you cannot wait to find a way to leave. Either way, there is a point of pride in coming from Appalachia that defies the rest of the country’s sentiments toward the people who live here and who have faced ridicule since the turn of the 20th century.

You also often hold two very distinct sentiments growing up here: Fierce pride in the region’s natural beauty and an awareness that economic decay is only a household away. For our cultural curators, the powerful who control our media, academia, Hollywood, corporations, government, and institutions, this is the middle of nowhere. For the people of this region, though, whether they are prospering or not, it is the middle of somewhere special.

In our current culture, the people of Appalachia are throwaway lines, often called hillbillies, backward, dimwitted, uneducated, and ambitionless. In our current politics, they are racists, homophobes, deplorable, right-wing extremists, bitter, God- and gun-clingers, and now “weird.”

Kirk Hazen, professor of linguistics at West Virginia University, said in 2017 that Appalachia was the most misunderstood region in the nation.

“No other region gets more negative press and wildly inaccurate statements said about it than does Appalachia,” he said.

Days after Vance was announced to be former President Donald Trump’s, Republican presidential nominee, running mate, Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY), who was born in Louisville, Kentucky, attended Vanderbilt University, and comes from a very different (non-Appalachian) part of the region, decided to go after Vance for his sense of place.

Beshear is the son of two-term former Gov. Steve Beshear, who served in the Kentucky state house when his son was born, became the state attorney general when Andy Beshear was 3 years old, served as the 49th lieutenant governor from when Andy was six, then served as governor when his son turned 30 years old.

 “J.D. Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear barked on MSNBC.

“He claims to be from eastern Kentucky, tries to write a book about it to profit off our people … This makes me angry,” he said on CNN.

Beshear picked an odd fight to take up with Vance.

First for a man of privilege to question the geographic credentials of a man who grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and Kentucky, with the former right on the edge of the government’s definition of Appalachia and the latter well within it, is curious at best, said Tom Maraffa, professor emeritus of geography at Youngstown State University.

“Then there is the large populations of people who identify with Appalachia because their families live just a smidge outside the region due to migration for jobs. J.D. Vance is one of those,” Maraffa explained.

Maraffa explained that early in his academic career, he introduced Geography of Appalachia to the curriculum at Virginia Tech.

“One of the first topics we discussed is, ‘Where is Appalachia?’ There is no answer. It just depends,” he said.

“There is Appalachia defined by the mountain range and its foothills, Appalachia defined by culture, and Appalachia defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission, to name three,” Maraffa continued, adding that they do not align geographically.

For Andy Beshear to try to strip away Vance’s identity for political kudos makes little sense. To have someone mention Appalachia as a point of pride should be something to celebrate, not admonish. Especially if you grew up with your father having a seat at a state government’s table of power.

But Maraffa’s criticism of Andy Beshear is not an endorsement of Vance’s politics.

“There is a lot about his politics that I don’t agree with,” he said. “I just wish journalists and academics would stick to honestly disagreeing with his positions rather than using bogus arguments about identity to justify their positions.”

 Maraffa said Vance wrote a personal story and interpreted his history in a personal way.

“He is no different than Eldridge Cleaver and, more recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates,” he said, referring to two radical black activists. “Both used their stories, like Vance, to advocate how to address social problems with Coates favoring reparations.”

Maraffa said if Andy Beshear or the media covering Vance were being honest, “Vance is not any more an opportunist than Hillary Clinton or Robert Kennedy [the elder], who were Democrat U.S. Senators from New York who were not actually from New York.”

He said at least Vance grew up in Ohio and went to The Ohio State University.

“Remember, Hillbilly Elegy was universally praised, and Vance was quite popular among progressives until he revealed himself to be a conservative,” Maraffa said.

Few outsiders have described Appalachia more poetically than former President John F. Kennedy, who, when speaking to his Cabinet in April of 1963, said despite technology and automation passing by this region and poverty now defining it, he had no doubt that someday Appalachia would succeed.

“The Appalachian region is an area rich in potential,” Kennedy said. “Its people are hardworking, intelligent, resourceful, and capable of responding successfully to education and training. They are loyal to their homes, to their families, to their states, and to their country.”

From its impetus in Schoharie County, New York, to its terminal in Mississippi, and the 250,000 square miles more than 25 million people call home in between, you will find the culture along the way is steeped in faith, family, and patriotism. The dialect is choppy, and the families are clannish, thanks to the original Ulster Scots people who called the wilderness home after fleeing religious persecution back home.

The despair is too often real because of the lack of access to the central halls of power and wealth. But so is the grit.

Still, an agonizing migration from Appalachia has been happening for decades. Between 1940 and 1963, more than 2 million people left the region, and at that time, local elected officials predicted that three out of four remaining Appalachians would be on the government dole by the 1970s. The only politician who seemed to see them or hear them, Kennedy, was dead six months after pledging to eradicate their economic misery.

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Maraffa said Appalachia is not somewhere you fly over or parachute into to understand.

“And it is certainly not a place you can take away from someone either,” he said.